Speech recognition technology seen as key to containing call centre costs

A new report from Dimension Data, which surveyed over 200 contact centres across the world, reveals that contact centres are investing heavily in the latest voice technology in a move to support cost reduction through the automation of basic and routine transactions previously handled by live agents.

The Merchants Global Contact Centre Benchmarking Report indicates that almost one half of all contact centres (44%) plan to upgrade current interactive voice response (IVR) systems or deploy new speech recognition technology within their centres in the next two years, a significant jump from the 6% who currently use it.

Businesses are now more likely to use technology to interact with customers than live agents, with over 54% stating that they deployed fully automated IVR technology in their contact centres. Even those customers that are put through to a live agent are more likely to be connected to an IVR in order to complete an enquiry, with over 40% of centres employing this manual-to-auto technology, compared to 7% who used it in 1999.

Mike Fairon, Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of Customer Interactive Solutions (CIS) at Dimension Data, commented: "Cost containment pressures have meant that contact centres are increasingly viewing self-service technologies, such as speech recognition, as a cost reduction too. Experience has shown that between 30%-40% of transactions that are currently performed in contact centres could be resolved without any involvement of a live human agent.

"Because voice remains the major channel used in contact centres, speech self-service technologies have proved their efficiency in reducing operational costs when implemented correctly. However, businesses must realise that the choice to use such self-service channels should always remain firmly with the customer."

Despite 50% of contact centres having invested in predictive dialling technologies, analysis of actual outbound volumes reveals that manual dialling is still by far the most widely used dialling method in services-oriented contact centres and accounts for 81% of all outbound calls. These findings indicate that this is an example of a technology that may have been purchased without first fully identifying the role it would play within the centre and the optimum method for its deployment.

Some 45% of businesses are currently using or planning to deploy voice over IP (VOIP) within their contact centre. This deployment of voice and data integration over IP and the overwhelming majority (78%) of respondents who plan to integrate voice and data across multiple sites would imply the industry will see a move towards the creation of "virtual" contact centres over the next two years.

First published in the UK in 1996 by Merchants, European contact centre specialist and a subsidiary of Dimension Data, this year`s edition is the sixth in a series of the industry-renowned benchmarking reports. The report has balanced global and industry representation from over 200 contact centres in 19 countries and five continents, and is an invaluable reference for all contact centre professionals. It provides managers with a set of benchmarks with which to measure operations against, including contact centre staff salary levels, performance statistics, technology developments, CRM trends and training needs.